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In this episode, John Fedro shares his 25 years of experience in mobile home and mobile home park investing, covering strategies for growth, managing operations, finding leads, and advice for new investors.
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John Fedro (00:00)
Well, I guess people know themselves and if you want this, ⁓ if you’re not willing to sacrifice for the next five years, ⁓ then, you if you want this a lot sooner,maybe do something else or if you just want to be behind the computer. Real estate, it’s a people business. is a getting your hands dirty business. You’re going to be five years of being uncomfortable. If you’re OK with the next five years leaning against discomfort, then you have what it takes. Yeah, yeah. I’d say that. That’s a pretty firm statement. But I’d back that up. Or I believe in that. Yeah.
Michelle Kesil (02:14)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, John Fedro who is a mobile home park investor. So excited to have you here today, John.John Fedro (02:31)
Thank you so much. This is awesome. I’m super happy to here with everyone.Michelle Kesil (02:36)
Great, so let’s dive in. First off, for those not yet familiar with you and your work, can you share what your main focus is?John Fedro (02:45)
For the last 24 years, it’s been individual mobile home investing. then…15 years ago, I started helping people do the same thing I was doing nationwide. And that’s been awesome to learn like the 50 state rules and laws and that’s like individual mobile home investing. And then I started buying the parks like seven years ago. And even when you’re buying the parks, you’re still doing individual homes. You’re filling up your parks, you’re selling your own mobile homes. You still have relationships and like all these other parks around you. So like the businesses, it’s easy to flip homes in those other parks. So even when you start to buy the parks,
You’re still like an individual mobile home investor which was awesome or it has been awesome because I’ve been able to do the same thing for the last like 25 years So and just add on different things like buying the parks Not sure if that was the question or if I just went off the topic
Michelle Kesil (03:37)
Yeah, no, that’s great. ⁓ And so are you operating across like the whole US or are there certain markets that you operate in?John Fedro (03:47)
For my main portfolio of individual homes is in Florida and Texas, because that’s where I’m from and moved to. ⁓ My parks are in Texas and South Carolina.And because that’s like the economy of scale. have like a manager that manages them in that cluster and then in the other cluster, I have like a maintenance person and a manager. But across the country, I’ve been able to work with folks doing like the individual mobile home deals. So we buy a single mobile home, we sell it on payments, or we flip it for cash. And so that I’m doing in all 50 states except for Hawaii. But every other state, it’s been wild to like, there’s it’s like the same characters in every state, like you have your parks that want
the money every month. You have the people that can’t pay that get into trouble like good folks that are paycheck to paycheck that have health problems, title problems, life problems, work problems. And so it’s just the same ingredients that, you know, we’re helping people that need help before they lose their home or they don’t want it anymore. We get into a cheap, we resell it. The park likes us. We’re doing following the rules. So it’s been awesome to be across the country when it comes to like individual mobile homes and
It’s been a wild ride. A wild, weird ride.
Michelle Kesil (05:04)
Awesome. And what do you feel have been some of the main keys that made the biggest difference in allowing your business to be able to grow and run smoothly?John Fedro (05:15)
Ooh. ⁓ Having on the parkside, having a partner that is amazing. Like I, if you have a full-time job or a part-time job and you’re trying to like get into the park space, man, having a partner that is like, I don’t like giving away half of the pie, but I see the value. And when you really have a partner that, I mean, maybe it’s more important than like a marriage partner. Maybe not. I don’t want to say that. forget.
roasted in the comments but like it’s so equally as important like your business partner can burn you and so that’s been awesome. ⁓ I micromanage too much so I’m starting to like let go and release the reins and like for the individual park stuff and then mobile on the mobile home side of things. ⁓
big, I just luckily I found, I stumbled into them. I never wanted to do mobile homes. I’ve never lived in a mobile home before my first investment 25 years ago. And it was like, I was lucky. I realize that now how lucky I was to stumble into this niche and
that yeah, allows us to help people that need help and sell to people that want to really buy the home. Kind of like emotional on both sides of the spectrum. We’re dealing with emotional people that need to sell quickly, and we’re dealing with emotional people that want to buy something and like spend a good amount. So we’re buying super cheap. We’re able to sell for a good ⁓ ethical profit and then do it again and again. ⁓
Michelle Kesil (07:33)
Yeah, so how does your role work in that case? Are you like the seller or like you’re like supporting people in the selling and the buying process as well as like the operations? Can you like expand on that?John Fedro (07:47)
sure, the people I work with around the country. ⁓ It’s amazing because nobody that I work with is like a genius. ⁓Michelle Kesil (07:50)
Yeah.John Fedro (07:58)
No offense to anyone that I work with, but I’m not a genius either. And we’re just too persistent to either like dumb or smart. We just don’t give up. And when we put ourselves in the way of so that people can find us, like there’s just naturally right now for the folks listening like five, 10, 20 miles around you, there are motivated people that can’t pay their bills. They don’t know what their options are. They’re embarrassed of their situation. And so when we’re able to find those folks, yeah, the folks I work with, I want to see like 40, 50 picturesof every home they work with. I partner with them, which has been awesome, like to actually, like, yeah, it’s been cool to work with amazing people more motivated than myself and to partner with them and make sure that they’re getting into the right deals. We make the right offers, the due diligence on all these homes, just cause it’s a mobile home in a park.
Like people think, I got some money to play with. I’ll just, if I lose some money, no big deal. Like that’s a terrible way to think. Like we don’t, shouldn’t want to lose money. We should be buying deals that are no brainers. When you buy a home and sell a home for cash, we want to double our money at minimum. So all your money in and all your money out, we want to double it. If you’re selling on payments, which I love to do, most parks are not cool with you renting homes out, but they will be cool with you selling on payments and selling on payments. You should get all your money back.
the invested capital you invested in one to twelve months make all your money back four hundred dollars minimum cash flow for at least five years so you’re
Selling these either for cash or for cash flow and so there’s so many ways that people can make mistakes overpaying over improving like if you’re an investor buying these homes you’re overpaying you’re over improving you’re selling to the wrong people you’re using the wrong handyman you’re leaving money on the table like a lot of money and so And we try to we don’t do like 50 deals a year We’re doing like 10 to 20 or so. So let’s capitalize on those deals sell them for an ethical price. So yeah, my business is
growing my own portfolio, helping other people. It’s been awesome. It’s been super cool to do this.
Michelle Kesil (10:08)
And so are you also involved in like the operations of the parks? How does that work?John Fedro (10:48)
Yeah, so on the park side of things, there’s so many things to do with mobile homes. Like that’s for the last 25 years, I don’t think I would have been as.I would have been like shiny object in different businesses, but the mobile homes have kept me busy like mobile homes in other people’s parks, mobile homes that have to be moved, mobile homes on your own private land. You can add mobile homes to that private land, selling the homes and renting the land and then the entire mobile home parks. So on the mobile home park side of things, we used to have full time managers at each location and
We were getting, I say we as me and a partner on the park side of things. It was one of the best things I did to outsource this. There were like two or three companies, there’s probably more now, but that’ll be like remote virtual managers for you. So they’ll be your manager.
and then they’re your full-time people and then you have on-site people. So I went from full-time managers at each park to like 10 hour a week part-time people and then I got these third-party managers that know the business like they know managing people way better than me and so I was getting like calls every single day two times a day from my full-time managers and it was so this sounds like whoa is me but it was like terrible like I didn’t want to keep getting calls for like stuff I felt like they should be doing it’s their
job and I just wasn’t a good
Boss, guess, or like I didn’t know how to train my managers, but these bigger managers now are overseeing the on-site people. So it’s wonderful. My calls went from like two a day to like we get on a zoom call once a week and it’s so nice. Like rents have gone up. Everything’s gone up. We’ve gone online. Like so it’s so super cool. So outsourcing that management role for my parks has been amazing, which allows me to focus on filling my parks up. We brought in last year over 20 homes in different, my couple different parks.
working with people across the country, investing in my own mobile homes locally. Otherwise, like that park business would be, and then looking for more parks. So it’s like you can’t manage, yeah, what’s it working on the business versus working in the business? And you can just get caught up with working in the business if you have a park and you’re doing it all yourself. Man, that’s a…
Maybe it would get easier like the more parks you do like the first one would be the slowest and like the tedious but yeah hiring that out having an awesome partner and having a good third party management company has been a game changer.
Michelle Kesil (13:16)
Yeah, that makes sense.That’s good to have that support.
John Fedro (13:20)
For real.Michelle Kesil (13:22)
And so how do you find your leads? Like how do you find the mobile home parks and the people to fill it up?John Fedro (13:26)
Yeah,of course. So we’ll start with the mobile home parks and then we can go to the individual mobile homes. ⁓ The parks.
Michelle Kesil (13:31)
Mm-hmm.John Fedro (13:36)
are I guess like with just with the mobile homes and the parks you can have people that are like raising their hands like they have a home on the market Facebook marketplace it’s on Zillow they have a park on Zillow on the MLS on Crixi.com mobile home park store loop net those are all commercial real estate sites but it’s like you know people raising their hands I want to sell who’s who’s out there to buy my park and my home those people want the most money I mean it’s not rocket science like if you’re puttingyour hand up, you want to sell your park or your home, you want probably as much as you can get. So off market parks, surprise surprise, are the best deals typically and then off market mobile homes are the best deals typically. So you need those off market people to find you. And so if you don’t have like an amazing website presence, which most of us don’t have like the number one website to find all of these sellers, ⁓ you can look on Facebook, you can look on those internet sites.
I’ve gotten two parks from the one from the internet like on mobile home park store one from the MLS I found actually this is a really good tip for the folks listening with mobile home parks I found two parks that were just listed as land so you can go ahead and like search Zillow or search realtor for just a land because sometimes those realtors they don’t see the vision like they see this mobile home park and they’re like a park I’m gonna list it as land
because
I don’t know what I’m doing and I think that this would sell better. When in reality no one’s seeing it because it’s listed as land. People want parks if they’re looking for parks. So I got really good deals that were online that were listed from realtors that were just in like the wrong section and they were already filled up with mobile homes.
Also with postcards that’s a common thing although people are getting saturated. Park owners are getting saturated with with postcards. And then on the mobile home side of things now you have people that are like
They’re behind on payments, they’re getting evicted, they’re in foreclosure, they’re already gone from the state and they want to sell their home. ⁓ That’s finding people like the traditional ways of talking to the park management. What a concept. Like every park has someone in charge. They know what’s going on. They know who’s behind on payments, who’s in trouble, who’s…
Getting divorced who’s on drugs who’s selling those drugs? So they know what’s going on if you go through the park and start asking friendly questions Talking to the management. That’s a really good start and around everyone listening to this There should be if you’re willing to drive 50 miles you can get to a hundred two hundred three hundred four hundred parks Family parks are cool age restricted parks are cool So finding out in fact most homes most mobile homes like 70 80 percent of them when they come off the factory they go to their
land. Most of us think like mobile home parks, that’s where the mobile homes are. And in reality, 80 or 70 percent are on their own private land, which is great. Those people get into trouble too. So you can have bandit signs in the area. You should know house flippers. You should be networking with people. You should have a website eventually, an online presence. But the more roads coming back to you, the better. I know that was kind of ⁓ a bleh, like just kind of sad. hope that people that made
Michelle Kesil (17:35)
Yeah.John Fedro (17:39)
sense to folks or maybe they can rewind it. But hope that was a little helpful to start.Michelle Kesil (17:43)
I think there’s a lot oftakeaways in there. People can listen a few times and get them all.
John Fedro (17:48)
Go. ⁓Michelle Kesil (17:52)
Awesome. So what are you most focused on solving or scaling to right now in your business?John Fedro (18:00)
Dude, you know what? I am super happy with my business as it is. I want to keep this going. I’m buying about one, maybe two parks a year. And that’s good for me. There’s people that want to buy 10 parks. I got to.you know, spend all this money from syndications and I gotta put this money to, and I don’t do, I wanna keep doing my individual mobile home business. I wanna keep working with other folks around the country and helping them. That’s been awesome, like to actually people that have done no deals ever or they’re coming from houses or something to like actually be super happy with themselves and happy that they’re helping people. So this is awesome. I mean, I hope I get more like five more decades doing this and.
I’ve worked hard to get to this point so I know it’s popular to like, want the world and I want this and that but I like this is, I am super happy and blessed and fortunate and I want to keep this going, keep riding this wave. ⁓ I don’t know.
Michelle Kesil (19:05)
Yeah, awesome. So are you morelike in the season of helping others right now?
John Fedro (19:10)
⁓ Well, that’s that does take a lot of time ⁓ during my day, so I’m sure that that may only be anotherMichelle Kesil (19:14)
Sure, sure.John Fedro (19:18)
decade or two or three. But I’m young enough and I don’t want to just be this old retired guy that could be right now. Like I just stop and put my feet up somewhere. But no, I enjoy helping others. I’m working with folks across the country that I can partner with. My friends have become the people that I work with as well. So that’s super cool to be selective. And I’m doing parks with the people. Not to make this all about me. I’m doing this, you know, in people across the country. They find parks.Michelle Kesil (19:42)
Yeah.John Fedro (19:46)
50 % of the people I work with that get into the individual mobile homes, they’re using it as a stepping stone to get to parks. So that’s been cool. Like I said before, you can ramp up in this business. there’s so much to do in mobile homes. So ⁓ I’m super happy with what’s going on and want to keep that going. Not sure if, yeah, I think I might have trailed off. My dog’s scratching at the door. So got to slightly sidetrack.Michelle Kesil (20:10)
Haha!That’s okay. What advice would you give to a new investor that’s maybe wanting to get into mobile homes?
John Fedro (20:22)
Do your research first. There’s so many different ways to make money in this business. I am full drink the Kool-Aid on mobile homes. So maybe I’m a little biased but do your research and there’s no like have have a support team no matter what niche you jump into Which I think is important. You should specialize or it’s important ⁓get educated, then have someone that you can reliably talk to and talk on, because there’s going to constantly, like any of those niches are probably real. Like if you put your mind to it, if someone else has done it, you can do it. But get educated, and then jump in, and know that it’s going to be difficult. ⁓ But it’s so worth it. I mean, it is so worth it. It’s so cliche that like real estate’s made the most millionaires in the world. But it’s difficult, but it’s so worth it.
the time and the stress and the ups and downs and the BS that we all go through. But having a support team, having like, it’s super, super important because there will be plenty of moments where you want to give up or you’re not sure what to do. And costly mistakes can like be super costly. So I don’t think that was like exactly like one magic bullet. It’s more of like you’re constantly walking on these coals. So like kind of maybe it’s a little scary or overwhelming, but once you’ve gone through it a few times, like this business changes you. It’s awesome.
Michelle Kesil (21:32)
That’s okay.John Fedro (21:42)
like real estate makes you way more of a people person, gives you thicker skin, everyone’s trying to like lie to you or cheat on you or get over on you. Not in a bad way, but it’s just like that’s the world and that’s the business and we either sink or swim and ⁓ if you want to swim you can absolutely swim and learn and that’s my long advice.Michelle Kesil (22:06)
Yeah. And so what would someone like need to do in order to make sure that they swim?John Fedro (22:16)
Well, I guess people know themselves and if you want this, ⁓ if you’re not willing to sacrifice for the next five years, ⁓ then, you if you want this a lot sooner,maybe do something else or if you just want to be behind the computer. Real estate, it’s a people business. is a getting your hands dirty business. You’re going to be five years of being uncomfortable. If you’re OK with the next five years leaning against discomfort, then you have what it takes. Yeah, yeah. I’d say that. That’s a pretty firm statement. But I’d back that up. Or I believe in that. Yeah.
Even if you don’t have everything that you’re going to need to know now, which you don’t, you will know that, or you’ll get access to that, or you’ll learn along the way.
Yeah, it’s awesome. Real estate has been wild. And then mobile homes, like still people turn their noses up to mobile homes all these years later. I always was fearful of that. Like, man, if people find out how good mobile homes are, we’re not going to have an edge anymore. Or it’s like, there’s going to be saturated. And it’s like, doesn’t, that hasn’t happened. Even on HDTV, there’s been like mobile home flipping shows. And it’s like, ⁓ we’re doomed. There’s no more mobile home investing. And it’s like, not the case. People, yeah, anyway.
Michelle Kesil (23:40)
Yeah, amazing. Thank you for sharing all of that.John Fedro (23:44)
Yeah, yeah, I love this. Yeah, people don’t want to… Anytime I can talk about mobile homes because it’s like I’m usually the weird guy in the room, but since you’re asking me all the questions, I have no problem talking about it.Michelle Kesil (23:57)
Great. Well, before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect and learn more, where can people find you and connect with you?John Fedro (24:07)
My website or YouTube, mobilehomeinvesting.net, there’s a bunch of free information there. And if you want to reach out to me at John, J-O-H-N, at mobilehomeinvesting.net, I’d be happy to answer questions for anybody. If you’ve got mobile home stuff, I don’t want you making mistakes. reach out and say hello or ask me questions. It’s awesome, Michelle.Michelle Kesil (24:33)
Perfect, well appreciate your time and your story. Thanks for being here.John Fedro (24:37)
Of course, this is so cool!Michelle Kesil (24:39)
Yeah, definitely. And for those tuning in, if you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like John who are building real businesses and we’ll see you on our next episode.
